Nomad

Nomad moves local file data into SharePoint Online and tells you the truth about what happened. When a transfer fails, you can see which file failed and why.

The sync client is the problem

The common way to move data into SharePoint is to drop it in a synced folder and let the OneDrive client push it up. That turns a migration into a sync operation and inherits every problem sync has, and those problems get worse in a tenant where many users are already syncing.

• Conflict file churn. A synced folder is constantly reconciled against the server copy, so any race produces conflict copies that someone then has to clean up by hand.
• Sync engine stalls. The "processing changes" state is a well-known dead end, and it offers no useful insight into what is stuck.
• Machine and identity coupling. The upload is chained to one user's machine with their OneDrive signed in and healthy. It cannot run unattended from anywhere else.
• Local staging cost. Pouring gigabytes into a synced location to stage a migration starts its own sync storm before anything reaches the destination.

Nomad does not use the sync client at all. It writes server-side through the Graph API, straight into the destination library, with app-only authentication. There is no synced folder, no placeholder file, and no OneDrive client anywhere in the transfer path, so that entire class of problem is gone by construction rather than managed around.

What this does not change is tenant throttling. Graph and SharePoint apply limits per tenant, and a migration draws on the same budget as every active sync client, so a large job still belongs outside business hours. That is where resumable state earns its keep: an unattended overnight run picks up where it left off if it is throttled, interrupted, or paused. Nomad honors Retry-After on a 429, so it slows down under load instead of adding to the problem.

Find the failures before the transfer

nomad scan walks the source first and reports every problem with a stable code and a severity. Errors block the migration unless you explicitly skip them; warnings are informational.

It catches the things that reliably break a migration three hours in: characters SharePoint rejects, leading or trailing spaces, trailing periods, reserved device names, Office lock files, names over 256 characters, relative paths over 400, files past the per file size limit, and directories it could not read. Empty files and empty directories are flagged as warnings, since SharePoint does not store empty folders.

Resumable by design

Job state lives in SQLite, not in the process. A job that is interrupted is marked interrupted and resumes later by label, from either the command line or the desktop console. Uploads run in parallel across files while each file uploads its chunks serially, and the concurrency level is persisted on the job so a resume continues at the same setting.

Every job writes an event log and a final summary a technician can read.

Least privilege

App-only authentication with a certificate. For sensitive tenants, Nomad supports Sites.Selected, which grants access to the specific sites you name rather than every site in the tenant.

Requirements

Windows 11 or Windows Server 2019 or 2022, Python 3.11 or newer, and PowerShell 7.x as the recommended terminal. Nomad installs and its tests run on other platforms, but the encrypted settings store relies on Windows DPAPI. An optional desktop console installs with the gui extra and wraps the operating system's built-in web view, so there is no Node, Electron, or separate browser to install.